Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2016 July 13 • Wednesday

There are lots of ways to spend the Fourth of July holiday. One of them used to be watching the Twilight Zone marathon on Channel 11 here in NYC. Does that still happen? I don't know. You'd have to ask somebody who receives a TV signal.

But here at Gutbrain headquarters we decided to throw on some Twilight Zone on Blu-ray and after watching "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine", which lays the groundwork for both an episode of Columbo and a Woody Allen movie, we moved onto the next episode, the classic "Walking Distance".

It really is a great episode, one of the best of the series. Bernard Herrmann wrote an original score for it that's one of his most lyrical and affecting pieces of music, while also being a model of subtlety, economy and understatement. (Where he places music is as significant as what music he creates.)

At the end of the episode, the world of 1959 adolescence is manifested by teenagers dancing to rock and roll in a drugstore. The risqué nature of their world and customs is suggested by the presence of pocket paperbacks on spinning racks. We see teens sitting at tables eagerly pawing handfuls of these books, passing them back and forth. They're all hopped up on reading!

So of course I wanted to know what hey were reading. Somebody could do a much better job at this than I did, but I'll get the ball rolling.

The first title to catch my eye was Chester Himes's The Real Cool Killers.

It's been a really long time since I read that but I bet it was pretty hot stuff in 1959. Parents would shake their heads when they saw that on the drugstore rack.

Next one I saw was Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing.

Then there was Doomsday Morning.

Then I Want To Live!.

Then Mickey Spillane's The Big Kill.

After that, finally some real beatnik stuff: Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans.

Underneath it in the same shot is the movie tie-in paperback for The Darling Buds of May, filmed as The Mating Game.

This is followed by a triple feature of Fulton Sheen's Way to Inner Peace— couldn't find an image of this edition online—and Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Crooked Candle and Nelson Algren's The Jungle, apparently a reprinting or reworking of his first novel, Somebody in Boots, presented in this edition as a juvenile delinquent novel.

And finally I noticed some of these teens pawing Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.

But which issue of TV Guide is this?